A five-star customer experience is a distinguishing feature and competitive advantage that is difficult for competitors to replicate. To improve the customer experience, it must first be understood. How is this done?

While other Europeans withdrew from Brexit-land, my family decided to move against the flow to Boris Johnson's hometown, London. It's necessary to visit Finland from time to time, and unfortunately, this often means flying. Air travel provides a good example of the importance of the customer experience.

A return flight from Helsinki to London can cost anywhere between 50-350 euros. A Ryanair flight takes two hours and fifty minutes. A Finnair flight takes two hours and fifty minutes. Both flights are on similar aircraft, the seats are equally uncomfortable, and the in-flight service is minimal in both. 

I use both airlines depending on the situation, yet Finnair always seems initially more appealing among these options.  How can two companies offering identical products compete with such drastically different pricing?

The Importance of Customer Experience

It all starts with purchasing the flight – while Finnair's online store is clear and straightforward, Ryanair's service is a digital labyrinth where the customer lives in a constant anxiety of uncertainty about which additional services must be added to the order. The initial low price easily doubles by the time you are at the checkout entering your credit card number. Now, the feeling of being swindled begins.

At Stansted during peak times, check-in and boarding resemble a high-efficiency dairy in the 90s, where thousands of dairy cows snake through their stalls for hours to separate their liquids into mini-grip bags. If you make it to the gate, you are in for “Ryanair's special”: Passengers are forced into a narrow passageway leading to the plane well in advance – usually even before the plane has landed. Instead of sitting on terminal benches, passengers spend up to 45 minutes leaning against the stuffy tube walls.

The biggest difference in Finnair's and Ryanair's products is the customer experience. A good customer experience can be a distinguishing feature and competitive advantage, and a sufficient reason to charge a tenfold price.

Improving Customer Experience Begins with Understanding

To improve customer experience, it must first be understood. Two good ways to approach the structuring of experiences are: 

1. Identifying User Groups:

   Primary user groups are formed by finding common denominators in people's behaviours, backgrounds, and needs within the mass of customers.

2. Exploring the Customer Journey:

   The customer journey is a method often used in service design to describe the customer's touchpoints during the selection, acquisition, and use of a service. A simple customer journey might include, for example, the stages of search, consideration, acquisition, and service use, but the division can be more granular, especially in the acquisition and use stages.

From Understanding to Detailing the Customer Experience

Once the touchpoints and journey of different customers through the service are understood, design and development can be better targeted, and areas for improvement can be more accurately assessed. 

Utilise Analytics. Analytics and heatmaps can quantitatively track how customers behave on a web service – which content is most consumed, which functions are used, and what paths are taken in the service. A/B testing can test two or more solutions to determine which best leads to the desired outcome. Analytics tools are usually inherently passive, suitable for handling large data sets, and are also vulnerable to misinterpretation of results. 

Interview Your Customers. A more active approach to the customer experience is obtained by directly asking for customers' opinions. Customer interviews can map out people's real needs, purchasing barriers, or usability concerns with services. 

Test Your Service's Usability. Another too rarely used tool is usability testing. The purpose of usability testing is to gather information on what the real user experience of the service is. For the test, a functional prototype of the service or product is created, which is evaluated by observing the behaviour of actual customers.

Compare Customer Experiences. It's also good to compare your service's customer experience with other players in the same industry. Two mysterious acronyms, NPS and CES, provide solutions here. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer willingness to recommend and satisfaction with one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend this service/product to your friend or colleague?”. The customer answers on a scale from zero to ten, where zero means very unlikely to recommend and ten means very likely to recommend. The NPS score is calculated from the responses as follows:

• Respondents who gave a score of 0-6 are detractors of the company.

• Respondents who gave a score of 7-8 are passives.

• Respondents who gave a score of 9-10 are promoters.
  
  
  

The NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Passive respondents do not affect the result.

Customer Effort Score (CES) evaluates how easy it is for the customer to transact with your company, essentially how much